Fatal attraction: A teenage gold-digger, a wealthy bully, an unhappy marriage and a bottle of arsenic

Did She Kill Him? A Victorian Tale Of Deception, Adultery And Arsenic

Kate Colquhoun ★★★★★

Florence Chandler was a pretty 17-year-old when she first met James
Maybrick, 24 years her senior, on a boat bound for England.

She came
from Mobile, Alabama, which was then, as now, somewhere to go from
rather than to.

‘Oh, Mama, can this really be the end?’ sang Bob Dylan, a
century later, ‘To be stuck inside of Mobile/ With the Memphis blues
again.’

Florence Chandler (left) was petulant. Her husband, James Maybrick (right), was a bully. It wasn't long before time revealed their marriage as a dead loss

Florence was accompanied on the voyage by her mother, the Baroness von
Roques, a racy multi-divorcee, who had just been abandoned by her most
recent husband.

The Baroness seems to have done little to stand in the
way of the romance that ensued between the stiff, wealthy Liverpudlian
cotton-dealer and her somewhat coquettish daughter.

Sixteen months later, Florence and James Maybrick were married in St
James’s Church, Piccadilly.

Upwardly aspirational, James had ordered up a
coat of arms at the last minute, together with its spookily prescient
motto, ‘Time Reveals All’.

It wasn’t long before time revealed their marriage as a dead loss.

James
Maybrick – testy, bullish, unfaithful and almost fanatically
hypochondriacal – seems to have dropped straight out of the pages of
Wilkie Collins.

Living in a grand house on the outskirts of Liverpool, with servants’
ears pressed to every door, the vain and impatient Florence sought to
alleviate her boredom through shopping and gambling.

She was petulant; he was a bully.

At one point, he wouldn’t let his
wife read any letters from her mother or her brother, and the only
letters he would allow her to send them were dictated by him.

In 1887, Florence discovered that James was keeping a mistress.

James,
in turn, was busily nursing a grudge against Florence and her family for
being notably less wealthy than they claimed before the marriage: the
Baroness was forever asking him for hand-outs, which she then failed to
repay.

Meanwhile, James was becoming more and more addicted to a vast range of
pick-me-ups and medicines, a fair number of which contained unfortunate
ingredients such as strychnine, arsenic and hydrocyanic acid.

Then along came young, snazzy Alfred Brierley, flash and dapper in a
loud check suit.

One thing led to another, and before long he and
Florence nipped down to London, where they enjoyed a secret dalliance at
Flatman’s Hotel, just off Cavendish Square.

Queen Victoria took the keenest interest in the case

Killing two birds with one
stone, Florence also used her time in London to consult a solicitor
about the possibility of a divorce.

James Maybrick smelt a rat, and told
Florence that he had put an advertisement in a newspaper asking for
information on exactly where she stayed and with whom.

Things went from
bad to worse. At that year’s Grand National, he screamed abuse at her in
front of their friends, at which she walked off, with Brierley on her
arm.

Back home, a quarrel ensued. Maybrick gave Florence a black eye.

Their doctor dropped by, and the
unhappy couple poured out their woes to him, James complaining that they
had not had sex for three months, and Florence countering that she
couldn’t bear the idea of sleeping with him.

While James was changing his will to exclude Florence, Brierley was
getting cold feet, and telling Florence that he didn’t want to see her
again.

This forced Florence to do an about-turn, begging forgiveness
from James.

‘My own darling Hubby!’ the letter began, unconvincingly, ‘...try to be
as lenient towards me as you can for notwithstanding all your generous
and tender loving kindness my burdens are almost more than I can bear’.

She signed herself ‘your own loving wifey Bunny’. (It’s odd,
incidentally, how the nickname ‘Bunny’ tends to scupper relationships:
in the Seventies, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe used to address the
former male model Norman Scott as ‘Bunny’, and that one also came to a
sticky end.)

Soon afterwards, Maybrick took to his bed, writhing around
in agony. Was his own excessive self-medication to blame? Or was he
being poisoned by his nearest and dearest?

And so we come to the letter, the discovery of which, in the style of
every great Victorian melodrama, was to turn adultery into tragedy.

One
Wednesday afternoon, Florence Maybrick handed her gossipy nursemaid,
the happily named Alice Yapp, a letter to post.

On the walk to the postbox, Yapp
handed the letter to the Maybricks’ little daughter Gladys, who promptly
dropped it in a puddle, messing up the address on the envelope.

Yapp took this as an excuse to open the envelope, and take a peek inside.

Needless to say, the first word in
the letter – Dearest! – immediately excited her interest: it was, it
turned out, addressed to Mrs Maybrick’s lover, Brierley, begging him to
see her once more.

‘He is sick unto death!’ she wrote, adding: ‘All depends upon how long his strength will hold out.’

The servants had already been
gossiping about the amount of arsenic left around the house, so this
letter seemed to be the proof they were after that their mistress was up
to no good.

So Yapp went to Maybrick’s brothers,
who took the matter into their own hands, forbidding Florence from
nursing her husband in any way.

In one of Maybrick’s more lucid moments,
his nurse claimed she overheard him say to his wife: ‘Oh Bunny, how
could you do it? I did not think it of you’.

Shortly afterwards, he
passed away, his brothers confined Florence to her room, and a search of
the house uncovered 120 items from 30 different chemists.

Was James
Maybrick an even greater hypochondriac than everyone had imagined? Or
was Florence Maybrick a murderess? Within 24 hours, the police came
a-knocking.

The trial of Florence Maybrick was a true Victorian
sensation. There were 500 applications for each available courtroom
seat. A mob yelled outside.

Newspapers could find space for little
else. Everyone had an opinion. The mob swayed to and fro, one day baying
for her blood, the next supporting her cause.

Did she kill him? The snappy title of the book is a question that is never really answered.

After hearing from an endless array of medical experts – all of them, then as now, contradicting each other – the jury delivered its verdict within a matter of minutes.

I won’t dampen the tension by revealing what it was, or what happened next, but whether they got it right or wrong is impossible to say.

Kate Colquhoun sways towards Not Guilty, whereas I am more of a Don’t Know.

Queen Victoria, who took the keenest interest in the case, was convinced that Mrs Maybrick was ‘wicked’ and guilty.

Colquhoun is surely right to say that the case encapsulated some of the great themes of the age: the spirited American woman driven to distraction by stuffy old England, the radically different attitudes of the Victorians towards male and female adultery, and so on.

It’s a fascinating tale that has been chronicled many times before, but is always worth hearing again.

My only reservation is that Colquhoun seems to have imbibed some of the purple prose of the era, and her language tends towards the overwrought.

‘The very air seems to shiver with significance,’ she writes on page one, and she keeps this up to the end.

Sometimes, she bites off more fancy words than she can chew.

She uses ‘enervated’ to mean ‘excited’ on two separate occasions, when it really means the opposite.

Nor am I sure that she is on top of ‘hiatus’, which she twice uses to mean ‘maelstrom’.

And what of her prefacing note that ‘Although I have stuck rigorously to contemporary sources, the reconstruction of history inevitably remains to some extent a work of imagination’?

This sounds to me like a licence to fib. Did She Fudge It? That is for the reader to judge.